Definition
ASSISORES (also rendered Assisors, Assysers). A Latin plural term from medieval legal usage carrying two distinct meanings depending on jurisdiction and period:
1. In old English and continental law: Persons who settled assizes or imposed taxes — that is, official assessors responsible for fixing and apportioning levies on property or persons. The term derives from the Latin assidere, meaning to sit beside or to assess, and points to the administrative function of valuing and setting obligations.
2. In Scots law: Jurors. The assisores in Scottish procedure were the members of an assize — the body of persons empaneled to hear and determine a cause. The term carried the same procedural weight as "jurors" in English usage, though it persisted in Scottish legal Latin longer than comparable terms in English sources.
Common Confusion
The term ASSISORES sits at the intersection of two very different legal functions — assessment and adjudication — that have since diverged into entirely separate institutional roles. A researcher encountering assisores in an English medieval source should not assume Scottish usage applies, and vice versa. The companion term ASSISUS (also Assisa) adds a third layer: it refers not to persons but to something fixed or settled — as in assisus reditus, a fixed or standing rent. These three related Latin forms appear in close proximity in historical sources and are easily conflated. Burrill's own entry clusters them together, which compounds the risk of misreading.
Why It Matters in Research
The dual meaning of assisores is a genuine research trap. A document using the term in an English fiscal or manorial context almost certainly refers to tax assessors, while the same word in Scottish pleadings or court records refers to jurors. Misreading one for the other produces fundamental errors about the legal proceeding or instrument under examination.
The Scottish sense is particularly important for researchers working with pre-modern Scots law records, where assize procedure was central to criminal and civil adjudication. The assisores in that context are not officials imposing anything — they are the fact-finding body, analogous to a jury. Confusing them with fiscal assessors inverts the entire character of the document.
Researchers should also note the downstream institutional connections. The English assessor tradition represented by assisores eventually feeds into modern property assessment law and municipal taxation frameworks. The Scottish juror tradition feeds into the distinct Scots law jury system, which retained procedural features absent from English common law. Neither line of descent should be read through the lens of the other.
The related term ASSISA (assize) is the conceptual parent of both usages — the assize as a sitting or session giving rise both to the assessment function and to the jury function. Tracking assisores without understanding assisa will produce incomplete results. Similarly, researchers working in manorial records who encounter assisus reditus should treat it as a rent-related term (a fixed rent), not a reference to persons.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary source here, and his entry is compact but well-structured. He attributes the tax-assessor meaning to Spelman, and the Scottish juror meaning to Skene's De Verborum Significatione alongside Spelman and Cowell — a standard cluster of early modern legal antiquarian authorities. Burrill does not elaborate on the procedural mechanics of either usage, but the cross-reference to assisus reditus (fixed rent) is a useful flag that researchers should treat these as a family of related terms rather than isolated vocabulary.
Spelman's Glossarium is the deeper primary source for the assessor meaning, and Skene's De Verb. Signif. is the authority for the Scottish juror sense. Cowell's Interpreter confirms the Scottish usage. None of these sources attempt to reconcile the dual meaning — they simply report usage by jurisdiction, which is the correct approach.
What historical dictionaries collectively miss is any systematic treatment of how assisores fits into the procedural history of either English tax administration or Scottish assize courts. Researchers needing that context must go beyond the glossaries to institutional histories of each system.
Jurisdictional Note
The assessor meaning predominates in English and continental medieval sources; the juror meaning is characteristic of Scots law. Do not transpose these usages. Modern Scottish legal terminology has largely replaced assisores with standard English terms, but the Latin form persists in historical records through at least the early modern period.